The Internet Monk posted about an ongoing kerfuffle regarding a popular and controversial Evangelical pastor named Mark Driscoll.  Should the “elders” of his church be calling him into account and repentance for various edgy sermons he has apparently given?

One problem seems to be that Mr. Driscoll’s “elders” are men he himself has chosen (this is based on the comments made on the Internet Monk’s site), but even if they weren’t chosen by him, he is the most popular by far over any of them; if he were to be called into account by them and didn’t want to submit to them, what would stop him from just leaving and taking his enormous following with him to another “church” of his own where he was the elder?

This situation is another manifestation of the problem of “obeying church elders” in Protestant communities that I blogged about previously.

The Catholic Church has tremendous respect for the mystery of God and His truth, a mystery which here on this earth can only be glimpsed at.

In particular, she is extremely conservative when it comes to declaring something as true about God.  In fact, throughout history it is most often the case that she is forced to define what is truth and what is heresy because she is challenged by someone who teaches heresy as truth.  So it is in a defensive posture that the Church works with regard to defining truth and heresy; she does not proclaim in a positive way every single thing that is true about God (as if that were possible for us finite creatures) but rather proclaims that, whatever you want to believe about God, there are certain things that are not true and so should not be believed.

So, even though the truths of the Faith do not change, we come to understand them better over time by the Holy Spirit’s working in the Church.  One example:  Jesus and the Father are one in being, consubstantial.  How do we know?  When was this dogmatically decreed by the Church?  The Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.  What provoked the Pope and the bishops of the Church to convene this Council and decide on this matter?  The teachings of Arius (hence the Arian heresy) that said that Jesus was not the same substance of the Father but rather only of like substance, along the way demoting Jesus to more of a demigod.

First Council of Nicaea

The Bible (the books of which had not even been formally canonized at this time) does not explicitly say they are of the same substance (let alone whether the Holy Spirit is one being with the Father and the Son), and the Arians had an interpretation for every passage of Scripture that seemed opposed to their teaching, so how did the bishops discern the truth?  They did it through the power of the Holy Spirit given to them as the leaders of Christ’s Church and by tapping into the deposit of the Faith entrusted to them through the sacred Scriptures and through the sacred (or Apostolic) Tradition.

One neat thing is that, though a particular teaching may only be declared as true dogmatically at some late time, that belief has always been true, and there is always evidence of it being believed in the history of the Church.  For example, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.  This was dogmatically declared as true in 1854 AD, but when you read the Fathers of the Church, Popes, bishops, faithful Kings, monks, etc. down through the centuries, you hear them speaking of the “immaculate Mother of God” over and over again.  You see art devoted to Immaculate Mary centuries before this dogma was declared dogmatically.

My friend Tom at Ecumenicity posted a few months back about an example of this with regard to praying for the dead.

Oftentimes when a Protestant hears that the Catholic Church declared some dogma in X century their idea is that the teaching was invented at that time or shortly before, when in truth it has been believed since the beginning of Christ’s Church.

I thought of this today when I saw the painting at the back of the latest issue of the Magnificat, Tobiah and the Angel by Verrocchio:

Tobias' namesake! From the Book of Tobit

When was this painted?  How about after the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s when the Catholic Church, in defense against the Protestant Reformers’ assertions, declared that the Book of Tobit was inspired by God and therefore belonged in the canon of Scripture?  No, it was about 100 years prior to Trent before Martin Luther was even conceived!

Does the fact that someone did a painting of a scene from the Book of Tobit mean that it is canonical Scripture?  Of course not; painters can paint scenes from any book they want, inspired by God or not inspired, but obviously over the centuries the great works of art we have are often of scenes from our Christian faith’s history: Christ, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, Old Testament persons and events (like this one), and so on.  It gives us a glimpse into the beliefs of Christians at different points in time throughout history and helps us to understand better what was believed to be true.

The Church did not have to dogmatically declare what books made up the canon until the 1500s because up until then there had been general agreement on the canon within the Church for over 1,000 years; not until the Protestant Reformers declared that the 7 deuterocanonical books were not inspired did the Church have to act to protect God’s truth from corruption or subtraction.

The deuterocanonicals, like Tobit for instance, contain beautiful stories of God’s providence and love, wisdom complementary to Proverbs, and history that is referenced by Christ in the Gospels!  The sad irony is that our Protestant brothers and sisters, who ostensibly reverence Scripture above every other authority, are missing out on this part of Scripture.

Hopefully these ideas will help you understand that the gift of infallibility to the Church is a negative protection, that is, a protection against teaching error, rather than a command that the Pope and the Church through Ecumenical Councils will always proactively teach every thing which is true about God and the Faith.  That list would be inexhaustible because God Himself, the Source of all truth, can never be fully described by us creatures through any set of teachings.  Rather, God protects the Church from teaching error as truth.  She is the servant of the Truth, not its master.

Three years ago, I broke my addiction to “The Bachelor/Bacholerette” series.  I was, before that, a weekly viewer who cleared my calendar so that nothing would interview with my show.  I loved those shows and enjoyed watching them with friends, enjoying a social event where we would sit on our psychologist’s couches, analyzing each contestant and making predictions about romantic matches.  But, I got clean three years ago.

The problem is, this week, a friend of ours (one wonders what sort of a friend would do this to us) told Devin about the delight of watching TV online; we don’t have a TV in our home and sometimes wish for something to watch on Friday night.  So, Devin convinced me to watch an episode of “The Bacholerette”.  I struggled, really I did, and made various protestations about the cheesiness of Chris, the host, and the danger of objectifying the show’s participants and the immoral behavior displayed at times on the show.  But, it was to no avail.  Because, we watched another show last night, and now I find myself thinking about next week’s show and suddenly I feel myself sinking back into my old bondage.

So, I confess that I am probably going to become a Bachelor/Bachelorette fan again.  I will close my eyes at the smutty parts and shake my head in disgust but continue watching religiously.

With that said, what do you think will happen with Wes?  Hee hee.

Because we’re friends.

BFF

Mrs. Bean holding Leo

Seriously, we got to meet Danielle Bean today!

You all remember this post from 4 years ago where I became the world record holder for owning the most Danielle Bean books (out of all 20-something-year-old young men).

Danielle is speaking at the Catholic New Media conference this weekend in San Antonio, so we picked her up from the airport, welcomed her to Texas (her first time here), and then ate lunch together on the (nationally famous) San Antonio Riverwalk.

She graciously held our sons even when they had soaked through their diapers, and she put up with my antics for 3 hours (if that isn’t heroic virtue then I don’t know what is.)  We had a great time!

I ran across this quote yesterday and thought is was good enough to share:

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith

“And I can’t believe it’s coming true!”
– Goo Goo Dolls, Big Machine

This post is about what I thought of the Catholic Church as a Protestant.

Specifically, the Catholic Church made the outlandish claim that all her teachings on faith and morals are true–that not one of them is in error.

When I learned that this claim was made, as a Protestant I smelled blood in the water, for I knew that there was no possible way that it was true, and so all I had to do was find one example of it being false, and the whole house of Catholic cards would come tumbling down.  My reaction and effort to sink this iniquitous “Church” had been shared (and is shared today) by many Protestants, including my Evangelical friend John, who has sprayed round after round of shotgun shells at every possible error he has read the Catholic Church has made, no matter how spurious the charge.  He, like me years ago, knows that this claim is false, and if he can just show one teaching to be an error, the Catholic Church is discredited and is exposed for its pyramid of human (and therefore false) traditions.

Why was I so sure that the Catholic Church’s claim was false?  Simple: look at human experience.  Every person (except Jesus) and every institution is corrupted.

With regard to people, we sin and do evil, and as the Bible says, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” because “there is none righteous, no not one”, with the exception of course of Jesus who was righteous and never sinned.

Every organization and institution, including the Catholic Church, is full of people who sin, and these sins corrupt the organizations.  Look at our country’s government: How many scandals were there this year and last year alone?  I can think of several off the top of my head, of marital infidelity, of corruption, and our country is one of the better ones!

St. Peter's Basilica

Companies make defective products and people die from them; courts issue false rulings that imprison or even execute innocent persons while the guilty walk free; our country said “all people are created equal” with the right to life and yet we enslaved African persons and now execute babies in their mothers’ wombs.

And the Christian “churches” aren’t much better.  How many pastors have been found doing evil things: bribery, infidelity, or worse?  And supposedly Christianity is the truth, yet all these different “churches” contradict each other in their teachings!  I may have been going to a church affiliated with the Baptists, but I didn’t call myself a Baptist–though I thought what they taught was mostly true, I surely didn’t necessarily agree with everything my pastor said.  Why should I?  He is just another sinful, fallible human being like me.

Further, the Bible taught (see above) that we are not righteous; in fact, Christ’s righteousness was imputed to us by the Father such that we appear holy because He only sees His perfect Son when He looks at us.  But we are sinful and corrupted and it is only that God declares us holy; we are not truly made holy.  (This is the Protestant belief not the Catholic one just to be clear.)

So with that backdrop, what gall for the Catholic Church to claim that she teaches no error!  It is unconscionable and must be a lie.  Protestant churches are at least truthful in that, though they contradict each other in many ways, none of them claim that everything they teach is true; at best they claim that the Bible is true and that they try to teach off the Bible.

And so I continued growing in my faith and sought to refute this wild claim, but as I did so, I was bothered by the lack of Christian unity, clearly against Christ’s command and Paul’s.  It led me to investigate where we got the books of the Bible in the first place, among other things.  It led me to investigate moral issues like using contraception, something I had always assumed was a good thing.

And as I investigated, I believe that the Holy Spirit started opening up my eyes, already blinded by a decent amount of anti-Catholicism, to at least consider challenges to beliefs that I had accepted implicitly from my (Evangelical Protestant) Christian friends as well as from the world during my long years as an atheist.

By what authority did I accept the 66-book Bible I had been given (first at 10 years of age by my aunt and uncle and then at 20 years of age by my Evangelical friends)?  Why did I believe that baptism was symbolic only?  Why did I believe that contraception was good?

Along the way, my friend Gerardo gave me a copy of The Story of a Soul, the autobiography of St. Therese, a French nun who lived about 100 years ago. I was astounded: This woman was brilliant and holy, and I had never heard of her before.  And she was Catholic?  Well, maybe a blind squirrel finds a acorn every once in a while, but it turns out there were more like her, e.g. St. Francis of Assisi, whom my dad was named after, and who followed Christ more radically than any Protestant brother of mine I knew, for he gave everything away and followed God as a celibate man!

I began to be convinced as each belief I held that contradicted the Catholic Church’s teaching had a reasonable answer to it, often more reasonable and faith-supported than my own belief’s support.  I learned about why the Catholic Church said contraception was immoral.  I challenged my Evangelical friends with the arguments, which to them I am sure was like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky, for “no one thinks contraception is wrong”, but their responses were unconvincing.  I challenged them on other beliefs; they did not have good answers nor refutations.

Fr. Steele, the Anglican priest who just became Catholic, said:

No, I don’t check my brain in at the door of the Vatican. But, my personal brain doesn’t have the last word either. Where is the beauty in truth? I can now say to my wonderful six children, ‘we don’t do this or that because the Church says that is not true and in the best interest of God’s people. And now my children don’t respond, ‘then why do some who lead the church do this or that if it is wrong?’ In an age of disbelief, the truth of the Church is a magnet not only for me but for my family. Previously I, much like Chesterton, pulled against the Church out of fear; now I find myself being pulled towards it all the more. (emphasis mine)

I remember one day realizing that the Catholic Church’s claim might just be true.  It was similar to the day when I began to believe that Jesus Christ might really be who He said He was.  It was exhilirating!  It meant that God had not left us alone to wallow in the corruption of error that plagued every institution.  It meant that, though “all” sinned and fell short of God’s glory, Jesus did not, which meant that we, too, could live in the true freedom from the slavery of sin.  Similarly, though “all” institutions, including churches, are corrupt and none teach truth without error, the Church Christ built Himself did not teach error because Christ would not let her.  Even though she was and is made up of sinful human beings, God gave us the gift of His Church so that we could know the truth, be set free by it, and live the truth by the power of the Holy Spirit.

St. Peter's statue

Two Parallel Protestant Objections

1. Protestants reject the Catholic claim that the Virgin Mary never committed a sin during her entire life.
2. Protestants reject the Catholic claim that she never errs when she teaches on matters of faith and morals.

The second one has been the subject of this post, but the first objection is a parallel one to it.  Even though Christ said “be perfect therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect”, if you ask most Protestants about this verse, you will probably get an answer like “well, it is hypothetically possible to live perfectly, but in practice ‘all have sinned’ and no one actually lives perfectly except Jesus”.  Funny though that Jesus didn’t say “be perfect but I already know that not one of you will be”; instead, he told everyone to do it and did not give any exceptions.  So why then couldn’t someone live perfectly, by the power of the Holy Spirit?  And if that someone was the Virgin Mary, why would we begrudge her that?  It wouldn’t have been done on her own but by cooperating with God.

In each of the two claims, a stupendous statement is made, not of human power and greatness, but of God’s power and greatness in spite of our human weakness and failings.  How terrific if both of them are true, and further, there is tremendous evidence that they are true, though you have to look with the eyes of faith and not of cynicism.  Faith says we can be perfect and the Holy Spirit can accomplish this in us humans; cynicism says no one has been nor will ever be perfect.  Faith says that the Church is Christ’s bride and will be spotless, the pillar and bulwark of the truth; cynicism sees only a bunch of men and women like any other, many doing evil things while claiming to be Christian.

I would say, ask yourself–whether Protestant or Catholic–what your problems are with the Catholic Church, and then I challenge you to take the issue most important to you and explore it; see what the Catholic answer is to your question and read the arguments made for and against.  Pray about it as well and discern where the Holy Spirit leads you.

May Christ graciously guide you to the truth!

I was reading the daily Scripture verses today for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and the second one brought to my mind one error that I think we (modern Christians) make when interpreting Biblical passages.  Here are the verses that caught my attention from Acts 13:22-26:

In those days Paul said: “God raised up David as king; of him God testified, I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will carry out my every wish.”

Now, we all know that David lusted after Bathsheba, committed adultery with her, and sent her husband to die on the front lines of his army!  So, is God a liar when He says that David is a man after his own heart and that carried out God’s “every wish”?

The short answer of course is No, God is not a liar but always tells the truth, as Christ said, and so it is an error of interpretation if we take these words in their “scientific” sense, where the word “every” has no exception and must mean that David never sinned and always did what God willed.  Clearly, God condemned David’s sin and he (or his children) were punished for them.  David repented and was forgiven.  So just as David’s evil deeds were certainly not conforming him to God’s own heart, all the same David was a man after the heart of God.

Similarly, we read that Jesus died and “three days later” rose from the dead.  What always comes to my mind is 3 days = 72 hours, but in fact Jesus did not stay in the tomb for 72 hours, since they were accounting days in a less “scientific” manner–an atheist trying to disprove Christianity would have (and many have had) a field day with such “contradictions” as the two just described, yet we understand that they are not contradictions but rather errors of interpretation that we modern men easily make.

Mary, Mother of God

Another, more controversial example is Matthew 1:24,25: “When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.  He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus.”

Well, it seems obvious to our ears, due to the word “until”, that Joseph had sexual relations with his wife, Mary, after Jesus was born.  Coupled with other Gospel passages mentioning Jesus’ “brothers and sisters”, it confirms the (seemingly) clear fact that Joseph and Mary actually had quite a few children after Jesus.

But in fact this is not the case.  The word “until” in the Greek does not have the exact same meaning as in English.  Examples abound in the Bible, but I read one just today in the Gospel reading (Luke 1:80 about St. John the Baptist): “…and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.”

If we interpreted this in the normal English way, it would mean St. John was in the desert until the day he was revealed to Israel, at which point he left the desert and perhaps entered the cities.  But we know that this is not the case; John was in the desert baptizing for repentance and rebuking Herod for his immorality and eating locusts and wild honey up until the time he was captured, imprisoned, and ultimately murdered.

With regard to Mary and Joseph, sacred Tradition tells us that they never had sexual relations; they both remained celibate (hence a “Josephite” marriage).  The “brethren of the Lord” has a clear explanation.  You can read about it and Mary’s perpetual virginity here and here.

The witness of the Apostolic Tradition is so universal that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Zwingli all affirmed as true Mary’s perpetual virginity! (Incidentally, they also affirmed her as “Mother of God” as decreed in the Council of Ephesus in 430 AD.) But many Protestants today are oblivious (often through no fault of their own) to sacred Tradition and even the beliefs of the Reformers, and so when they read the Bible, its “plain” meaning in these passages leads them astray.  I can understand how this is so because I thought the same thing as a Protestant.

When you hear someone make this error, ask them if they know that Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all believed in this teaching.  If you see a Protestant apologist make this error (James White is a good example of someone who persists in it), examine the arguments made and decide whether you will believe him or the universal witness of Christ’s Church through the centuries (and including all of the most important Reformers).

One of the newbies just laid her first egg yesterday.  Can you guess which is the pullet egg?

Called Neighbor, a real-time strategy (RTS) game like Starcraft but for the web and much smaller in scope.  A screenshot in its very nascent stage:

Won't You Be My Neighbor (So I Can Blow You Up)?

The game area is on the left, with vertical and horizontal scroll bars around it; the controls area is on the right, with currently only a slider control for zooming the game area.

What do I envision for the game?  A web-based RTS written in Silverlight that takes its inspiration from a particular Warcraft II “pud” (or game map) called Neighbor.  In that game, you started with a small area for your base, surrounded by trees, with your opponents just on the other side of the trees.  The game progressed by you and your neighbor both building up your armies within sight of each other, while your lumberjacks chopped through the trees, eventually opening up a pathway through which your armies battled; there were up to 8 players on such a map, and different strategies were employed to win: Some players wouldn’t chop through their trees at all in order to use projectile attacks from archers and towers to shoot the enemies over the trees; others would try to bring their ground army to bear immediately.

This game is more difficult than the tower defense one, which took me long enough to finish as it was, so I am not 100% committed to completing this game.  However, I am going to start on it and see how much progress I can make with my idea as-is; then if it is too big in scope I can revise downward.

One goal I am making for this game is for its screen size to be 480 x 320.  Silverlight is being ported to work on mobile platforms that run on cell phones, so my hope is that if I finish this game one day I could not only have it on the web but also it would be runnable on a mobile device.  I would love to see it on the iPhone but Apple is not a fan of having other companies’ technologies running on their proprietary system, so as far as I know they would rather drop dead before seeing Silverlight run on the iPhone.  There are specific challenges to making that work, but proof of concepts have actually been done to run Silverlight games on it–whether it would ever be sanctioned (and say, purchasable through the app store) is a different story.

Nonetheless, there are many other phones that will run Silverlight, so it would be cool to get the game on it.

Unfortunately, having such a small area for the game constrains how much I can do with it, especially for an RTS, which typically have sprawling maps.  But, with Silverlight, in just a few hours I used it render features to make the game area zoomable, such that, when zoomed out fully, yes the game is too small to manipulate individual creatures, but you can zoom in to a region of the map and then scroll around at that zoomed in level to see the whole thing; this feature allows me to put a critical mass of “stuff” (trees, lumberjacks, bases, rock minerals, etc.) on the screen which will make the game interesting.

Happy first Father’s Day, my love.  How blessed are our sons to have a Papa like you, one who reads to them and changes their diapers and teaches them virtue and makes them laugh.  You are truly a father in the image of God the Father, for whom every family on earth is named.